I have a theory as to why people avoid change. Or put another way, people embrace the status quo. Examples of this in our behavior include resistance to changing work office assignments or layouts. People do not want to move their
work location even if it is just moving to another area in the same building or a different building in the same office park.
Investment counselors report that people do not make changes in their investments as often or when they should.
People who inherit money in the form of investments usually do not change the investments even if advised that the investments are not optimum. They prefer the status quo.
I can attest that most people continue to use the same commute route
even if it is badly congested and there is an alternate route that is faster. Take a look at the morning commute on highway 101. There are side roads that are relatively congestion free. The 101 route may have been pretty good when there
was a recession on, but when our economy recovered to full employment and 101 became grid locked, people continue to use it, unwilling to explore new routes.
So here is the theory: As humans were evolving from being tree dwelling primates
to being social pre-humans living in groups to being true Homo sapiens 200,000 years ago and up until recent times there was a real disadvantage to being adventurous change seeking individuals. Picture a group of people say 50,000 years ago living in
the Pleistocene age in one or several caves in Europe. They are fairly safe hunters and gatherers, maybe with some livestock and growing simple crops. A nice boy grows up with an adventurous spirit, who decides to move out of the safe
environment he lives in, and leaves to see what it is like over the next mountain range. He finds a nice valley with easy access to water and game, and moves into a nice dry cave. But he doesn’t know that his next door neighbor is a saber
tooth tiger who eats him. (Or at least kills him to see what he tastes like.) This nice young boy’s genes are taken from the gene pool. End of story. People fear change because change was strongly discouraged by nature and the
way we evolved. The status quo is safe. Fearing change is in our DNA. It is a Darwinian thing.